


Queenmaker

by Stonehill



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: And you can't tell me otherwise, Bonding, Casterly Rock, F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Friendship, Pining, Post canon, Post-Canon Fix-It, Romance, Sansa Stark is Queen in the North, because Tyrion is so Lost, introspective, so much pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-12
Updated: 2019-05-12
Packaged: 2020-03-02 07:24:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18806467
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Stonehill/pseuds/Stonehill
Summary: “Where did you find the courage to say no to a Dragon Queen?”Sansa Stark smiles. “Power resides where men believe it resides,” she quotes.Tyrion opens his mouth in astonishment, wondering where she’s heard Varys’ philosophy. And her smile grows, mysterious and full of secrets.“But I am a woman,” she reminds him, “and I choose to give or take power, where I want it to belong.”Tyrion finds himself the representative of Queen Daenerys in the negotiations for the Independence of the North after the last battle is won.





	Queenmaker

**Author's Note:**

> Oooof  
> I just barely made it before the premiere of the new episode! This idea has been sitting at the back of my head since the new season started, and after episode 4 (and before episode 5) it suddenly solidified into a proper, tangible idea.
> 
> This is mostly based on the show, but I take details and make a lot of references to the books as well (such as the age difference).  
> The design of Casterly Rock is also not inspired by the canon design, but the one by AndrewRyanArt on DeviantArt.

She arrives, the spirit of winter, the day the first snows fall on Casterly Rock.

The formidable old stones welcome the grace of winter’s gentle veil with the solemnity of one who has held his breath for too long, and soon the gold and the red tiles of the buildings have vanished, leaving nothing but innocent white.

The ghosts of the old keep barely pay attention to the life that erupts in the wake of winter’s coming. The dead don’t mind the living, save when they can draw them across to their side. Servants bustle quickly around the courtyards and up the outside stairs, the walkways and bridges, to sweep the snow away.

Tyrion wonders at the futility of it all, as he watches the activity from the windows of his study. The ocean roars in greeting of winter clouds, formidable and grey, and he recognizes their might, recognizes that soon the snow will fall, thick enough to blanket them all. And then brooms will do them little good.

From here, he can see the moment the procession from the North passes through the gates from Lannisport, long before the servant comes to announce their coming.

He flatters himself that even in the distance he sees copper red.

Except it is only flattery, flat and insubstantial. For as the Queen in the North rides through the lion’s gate, the wind from the sea catches the grey and silver of her hood and throws it back to reveal the beauty of finest velvet, deep and enchanting like only Dornish wine can be. It floats like gentle waves on a wild wind, dancing with the forces that would tame it and falling gently back to its place, unchained, as the wind dies.

Frozen Tully blue take in all that could have once belonged to her: the towers and balustrades, the gold and the people here. And as her season blankets them all, it is difficult to preen at the ghost filled halls that had created the monsters that once held her captive. Once again she feels a stranger. Though she is here, and he knows her, she is all Winter Queen.

Only when her gaze finds Tyrion in the crowd, a tiny lord, unimpressive amongst his knights and guards, does her gaze soften, the deep blue of the sea washing back in. And for a moment, Tyrion feels like he is drowning.

Servants introduce them, introduces her entourage and her knights, before doing the same for House Lannister, and though formality demands he pays attention, for once it is difficult to care for those he might have to play games with soon. For his queen. For the good of the realm.

A useless game, he thinks as the Queen in the North dismounts on her own. Tall, her every limb singing a song of elegance and harmony so beautiful he hears one of the lesser noble girls sigh in admiration. Winter flowers are braided into the decorations of her hair, a crown of flowers, the only sign of innocent romanticism still left in her character.

“Lord Lannister,” she greets him as she pauses, lowering herself with no more than a nod.

The grey cloaks, that keep her warm on the long ride, flow forwards like the tide, hiding him from his House for a single moment. A protective shadow that affords him a single chance to meet her gaze, unhindered by politics. Her eyes are dancing.

And Tyrion nearly laughs.

_My lord is the standard response._

A futile game, indeed.

“Your Grace.”

Whispers break out in the crowds behind him, shock a tiny ripple for now. Giving ground so easily and so quickly suggests more than courtesy and formality, but the nature of these negotiations. The result that Tyrion is willing to accept. Even if it means he will lose her forever in the process.

“Eventually the Starks are always right, Maester Aemon of the Night's Watch once told me,” Tyrion says, in an attempt to disguise their voices from her. And he means to say other things, say so much more. But this is all he can find the words for now. “Winter is coming.”

She smiles at the humour in his greeting. “The winter came a long time ago.”

“True,” he allows in mock solemnity. “But this is the Westerlands and we are shy of winter’s winds here.”

Of course, they would arrive with their queen, he wants to say. But the words are frozen in his mouth. Her eyes are still dancing, still entirely focused on him, seeing through him, and it’s so difficult to breathe in her presence, so easy to forget that they are not the only ones in this world, now that she is returned to him once more.

“Yet, you do not tremble,” she observes, and _my lord_ rests on soft lips, though she refuses to spill the old vows of fealty. “Though you do not wear the protection of your people.”

Tyrion cracks a smile, and tugs at the grey and red tunic inlaid with black furs, invisible to the eye. It gives him a moment to collect himself, to divert his gaze. “Ah, yes,” he says, “but I have been blessed with the experience of northern winters, and pride myself on having learnt from it.”

It’s nothing more than an exhalation of breath, a trembling across her lips, but Tyrion still hears it. Sansa laughs.

His head flies up, his eyes searching hers. But her face is an impassable wall of royal majesty and quiet stubbornness. Still, she refuses him the pleasure of passing beyond her armor of courtesy, and, still, she reminds him of what it looks like when it does. And he knows he’s lost before they have even begun, knows it with the certainty that comes with his own greed and desires.

* * *

Tyrion has opened the best quarters in the Rock for her.

They were decorated by his grandfather for his grandmother. Delicate, the golden decorations are not meant to overwhelm. Instead of roaring lions and red velvet, flowers in gold and silver spin the marble columns and hand-carved wooden furniture. The balconies face the ocean to the north, with a view of Lannisport and the coast. And Tyrion tells himself its because she can see the way home here. He tells himself it’s because she is a diplomat on a difficult mission. He tells himself it’s not because it was his mother’s favorite rooms, nor because it has near direct access to the library. He tells himself it’s not to show off what she could have had here, had she stayed.

He does his best not to imagine her there. Tries not to think of what it looks like, with her Tully blue eyes and her hair, red like his favorite wine. He tries not to wonder if her pale winter fingers run along the flowers, or if she places a knife below her pillow. So he focuses instead on the letters and documents from King’s Landing, from the new Targaryen Dynasty and their Hand.

Daenerys had sighed and closed her eyes in bitter defeat, months ago. “How can I not honor all that she has suffered? But,” she’d added, lifting her head and catching Tyrion’s gaze across the table, “I have conditions.”

Those conditions lie on his desk in the library now, spread out on several different documents. Negotiations for the liberation of the North, peace treaties, already drafted. It is Tyrion’s job to make the Queen in the North agree to one of these, each stricter than the next, to ensure that war shall never again break out in Westeros.

He smiles and shakes his head at the queen’s demands. She’s asked him to perform an impossible task. That much was clear from the moment Sansa rode through the Lion’s Gate.

She will have her freedom on her own terms, and he knows with the surety of his own bones that none of them will be able to stand in her way.

That becomes all the more clear during the feast that evening. Though she smiles little, and plays none of the games of charm and flattery she had undoubtedly learnt in King’s Landing, she speaks with a quiet solemnity, she listens with attention, and she learns the names and histories of the people around her with an ease and a grace that reveals how easy it is for her to make others trust her. To gain their allegiance.

She was always good at that. Once, she had used it as a shield. Now it is her weapon, one she wields with the grace and mercy of a master.

If they had had more time together, Tyrion wonders if she would have used it to shield even him.

Not that it matters now.

Power suits her far better than defense ever did.

She walks, straight-backed and elegant, like a lady from old songs who graces their company with the magic of fairy tales. And though her gown is heavy and dark, the grey is adorned with delicate decorations of silver, and where the heavy cloth cuts away above her chest, black Myrish lace crawls up to collar her throat, leaving the winter white of her skin nothing but a whisper, a memory, below. In the candle light, her red hair glows like flames down her back.

It all reminds him, painfully, that he never truly figured her out.

Sansa wears her purpose on her sleeve, for anyone to see. To the point that it had caused him sleepless nights and fearful daylight hours. _What do you want?_ _Why must you always want what I cannot find a way to give you?_ He’d seen dragon fire consume men and their children, he’d seen towers crumble under the weight of a queen’s wrath. And he had flinched from the nightmares, flinched when Sansa would not.

And somehow, simply by being who she is, painfully honest and stubborn as only the Wall can be, she’d accomplished her goal.

 _Nearly_ , he reminds himself, and reaches to pour more wine.

“You are drinking quite a lot.”

Her voice drapes around him like the finest silk, a minstrel’s song in his ears. And it distracts him, tears through him, long enough that Sansa’s elegant fingers steal away the carafe of wine and its place in his attention.

“It is a feast, my lady,” he reminds her, holding up his cup in greeting. “And I do believe I am not the only one who enjoys a cup of wine in celebration.”

It’s still burnt into his mind’s eye. Her smile at Jon Snow, when he was still her family, when she’d still been safe, surrounded by warriors and wildlings. It had fallen so easily on her lips that night, as if that’s where it had belonged.

Now her eyes only dance with silent amusement. “Is this what this is, then?” she says. “A celebration?”

“Is it not?” Tyrion tilts his head. “A greeting, then. To old friends.”

A part of him is celebrating, and he feels ashamed for it. She is here, where she would once have been forced to belong, and after months of being lost to one another, to the distance, they are together again. In a sense. In the worst place possible. And yet he gets to observe her and listen to her voice. In the morning, he will have to reason with her enchanting intellect.

“Yes,” Sansa murmurs, glancing away to the fields of people, courtiers, servants, sers and ladies. “I suppose we have been treated as old friends. Thank you for that.”

Her eyes fall on him again, deep and blue, reflecting the gold of candle flames. And it weighs on him, captures him, draws his attention until he forgets how to look away.

Tyrion carefully places his cup of wine back on the table.

“You are the one who ended the conflict between the Starks and the Lannisters, my Lady,” he reminds her solemnly. “I simply made sure that my House knew, as well.”

What goes unsaid between the lines, _A Lannister always pays his debts,_ is an excuse not to thank her. Not to express how grateful he is for her pardoning of his brother, for clearing his own name, finally, of Littlefinger’s deceit. Daenerys would have pardoned him, but the taint of scandal would have lingered into the years and haunted him, the way it had done his older brother.

“It makes it easier to host these negotiations, as well,” he reminds her, japes, because he has never been good at handling her silences. “When I don’t have to worry about the unfortunate acts of vengeance that follow in the wake of ignorance.”

“You would not have had to worry about that either way,” she says. “That’s why I brought my men.”

 _I know_ , he thinks. _I know it is your own strength, the strength that derives from your loyalty to your people, that makes you safe. I know you don’t need my protection anymore._

“Speaking of,” he says. “I didn’t see Ser Brienne in your company.”

For a moment the smile falls even from her eyes, and she sighs. Without thought, she picks up his cup and takes a sip of the wine. “The winter isn’t treating the twins well,” she explains. “I could not take their mother from them now. And I’m sure she would not visit this place even if she could.”

Tyrion nods and sighs. The Lannister castle holds many ghosts for all of them, and Tyrion isn’t the only one haunted by Jaime’s memory. There had been a moment in Winterfell, when they had all been happy, when there had been smiles and laughter on their lips, and Tyrion had never felt closer to his brother. It had been as if there had been no Cersei, no Tywin.

But Jaime had left them to do what was right. He had left them to free himself of his sister and the monster he had been in her company. The heartbreak that had caused Brienne of Tarth still hasn’t healed, and Tyrion wonders from the content of Sansa’s raven scrolls, if it ever will.

He does his best not to dwell on the courage of his former lady wife, for traveling all this way, for going south once more. For the sake of her people. Without the only knight that’s always been at her side since she had grasped her own freedom.

“I still haven’t forgiven Selwyn Tarth for stealing their Name Day out from under my nose,” he japes to distract her from the melancholy of the situation. “But I suppose it’s better not to name another pair of twins Lannister.”

“You also haven’t come North to see them yourself just yet,” she reminds him, and her smile returns to the edges of her eyes. “Something Brienne isn’t the only one who’s disappointed by. How can you know your family if you never make time for them?”

Sansa had always been a master at the art of sowing and weaving. She knows how to paint pictures and obscure their meaning amongst the threads, so one can’t discern which motivation they lead back to. And even now, even now, when she catches him off guard, when she gives herself away, she weaves a different meaning on top of her words, misdirects him. And Tyrion barely knows how to respond.

He doesn’t dare hope, when hope is all he wants to hear in her voice.

Sansa’s eyes no longer waver. Her attention has found him and locked. Unafraid and certain, as if there is no danger in her words, as if she sees through him to his core, and finds no cruelty or ugliness left.

 _You asked me to broker this deal with her, because you expected me to know her, to be able to play my games and bend her to my will,_ he thinks silently to Dany. _But you cannot bend ice, and if you ask me to see through her, I might not come back, at all._

But Sansa takes mercy on him, then, melts a little for him. And falls into a story about the twins, about Bran. Reminiscence on her tongue. Old stories, _do you remember_? They are not really their stories, but they are stories they have both witnessed, familiar as the old stones of summer castles. And slowly she leads him into a dance of words, a duet of minstrel song that he’s never sung before for the simple pleasure of the memories it brings.

* * *

Tyrion wonders when he began to believe in love again.

Perhaps it’s his time with Jorah Mormont that has softened his cynicism. Watching man after man fall in love with Daenerys Stormborn is bound to make you think, and perhaps he should have been reminded of his own tragedies in seeing Daenerys turn them away, or express how little she cares for each of them. But watching Jorah Mormont wander across the world for his queen based on simple, one-sided devotion, not once, not twice, but three times had reminded Tyrion that love is more than just wanting another person. Love is more than sex and marriage. It is something deeper. Something that moves people to do the impossible.

And it had moved Jon Snow. It had moved a man who had sworn allegiance to his people to abandon their faith and bend the knee to a queen he was only beginning to know. It had moved him beyond the wall and back, through countless battles. All to get back to Daenerys. And in the end it had moved him to save his sister, his sister from the family he had nearly abandoned, but could never truly let go of. Love was never the death of duty for Jon Snow. It had been his duty. And it’s difficult not to be moved by that, not to see Jon Snow’s love, and find strength in devotion.

Tyrion had scoffed at it, had rolled his eyes and turned away from it. And perhaps always believed in it, perhaps he’s simply turned his face from it because before the Starks and before Daenerys, all he had seen love move people to do was hate and hurt. His father had acted on love all his life, but it’d been the love of the dead, the love of a single woman who had given her life for Tyrion’s. And Tyrion had never been forgiven for it. And like Tywin, Cersei had followed. And Jaime… Jaime had been caught in the middle of his own love; the love he’d felt for his twin and his father, and the love he’d always felt for Tyrion. Before Brienne of Tarth, it’d nearly torn him apart, and because of Brienne of Tarth he’d been moved to act, and even if it’d taken his life, Tyrion cannot blame him for it.

So perhaps he’s always known that love is a force to be reckoned with. Perhaps he never really stopped believing in it.

His child bride, the tiny prisoner that had been placed in his care against his will, had been the ultimate reminder that whatever the romances say and the mistrels sing, if you are a dwarf with a face cut in half, there is no winning over the other person. And for every chance he’d had at breaking through her fear and sorrow, his family’s hatred had gotten in the way. Shae, too, had reminded him that where money is involved love can never flower forever, and Tysha… he tries not to think about Tysha. Whatever she’d been, real or an illusion, his father’s hatred had forever burned the truth to ash.

Not that he’d ever wanted love from Sansa Stark. How could he demand something so monstrous from a child, from a person who’d been so close to turning into a lifeless puppet in an attempt to protect herself? But an ally, somebody to rely on… somebody who would eventually see that he was not his family, that he was worthy of her trust…

No. That’s a lie.

When Tyrion closes his eyes, he can still see the blue of her eyes in the face of death. He can still feel her hand against his heart, her fingers against his lips. There had been a moment in those crypts when love had moved him, and denying that now would be lying to himself. Beautiful, intelligent, and honest to the point of brutality. She counters him move for move, like a master fencer who’s found her blade in her words, and he never quite knows what she’ll do or say next, only that he hangs on, desperate to see how she will surprise him next.

It’s why he doesn’t protest Daenerys’ decisions to appoint him as negotiator for the independence of the North.

It’s why he’s seated in the council room the next morning, and rather than dread the interactions to come, he feels a thrill of excitement. Not the smug anticipation that comes with a political ploy set in motion, or a trap well laid. There is no trap, not really. Not when he’s looking forwards to the challenge of her words more than the results that come after.

Tyrion plans on enjoying whatever time or interaction she spares him, he plans on committing her every word and expression to memory, before borders will part them forever.

A more selfish man would probably try to divert her attention, convince her to stay in the Seven Kingdoms, he reflects as she enters with her advisors and knights. A more cruel man would see the graceful majesty of her pale furs, black leather and silk, and remind her of all they would own together, all that they could gain. But though Tyrion does not consider himself a selfless man, nor a kind one, he had never been able to put his pleasure before her wishes.

And as he sees her turn back to smile at her knights, and nod to her advisors, he knows that that hasn’t ended.

“Lord Tyrion,” she greets him, as she turns around, and her eyes grow just slightly at the empty table. “Did we arrive too early?”

With any other political opponent this would have made him gleeful. Surprise is weakness in a discussion such as this, and it would be easy to gain the momentum here. But it had never been his intent to change the topography of power, and even if it had been—

His eyes catch on the silver ring holding up a silver chain, and Tyrion feels the world slide out of proportion. His fingers itch with the feeling of golden chains pressing against his skin. And for a moment he can see Shae jumping across Lord Tywin’s bed, desperate and fearful, but intent on ending his life.

Tyrion swallows thickly.

“No, I—“ he scratches his palm absentmindedly and finds a smile. “The queen trusted that one representative would limit the bickering across the table today. Less interests to account for.”

“I never expected you to serve as a simple mouth piece for your queen,” she observes.

And damn her. It’s another veiled insult. Or a veiled compliment. He can never tell with these, and more than anything he feels like she’s telling him that he’s underestimating his own worth.

The chain tinkles gently as she sits down across from him, her blue eyes never leaving his face. Damn her.

“Oh, I’m sure that Her Grace expected more than that of somebody so intimately acquainted with Lady Stark as I am,” he counters, perhaps a little spitefully.

The man by her side coughs awkwardly. Sansa narrows frosty eyes. And Tyrion smiles, impish and preening with this tiny victory. _Your move, Lady Stark._

“You forget,” she says, gracefully spreading out her prepared notes with an elegant hand before using the motion to lean forwards so she has his full attention. “That that courtesy goes both ways.”

The chain clicks against the desk as she moves, and yet Tyrion barely hears it, breath caught in his throat and eyes captured by the intensity of her blue, blue gaze. It feels like drowning.

And before he can regain his footing, she smiles, donning her armor of courtesy, and says “shall we begin, Lord Lannister?”

“Right,” he murmurs, collecting his thoughts quickly, mind shifting through the different treaties he’d drafted for Daenerys before leaving for Casterly Rock. “Queen Daenerys’ demands are first and foremost that the Northern Crown give up their claim to the Iron Islands, and the western regions, which includes Her Grace’s maternal blood ties to the Vale of Arryn and the Riverlands, as well as her claim on the Westerlands through her—“ he swallows thickly and does his best not to fumble, “marital connection to the Lord of House Lannister.”

The men and advisors at Sansa’s side shuffle awkwardly as if some great weakness has been revealed in her armor. But the Queen in the North keeps her fingers folded gently in her lap and doesn’t look away. “Go on. I’m sure the Dragon Queen has more demands.”

Tyrion pauses. Again the title sounds like an insult in her mouth, and again her face remains impassive, inscrutable. He has no hope of knowing what she might be thinking about Daenerys’ claims, nor his own assumed ones. But it will do him no good to dwell on it, and so he launches into a list of demands on tariffs and one-way import taxes, that the North pay their portion of the Realm’s debts.

“—As well, as the promise that the North will retain strong ties of loyalty through marriage by the throne’s suggestions.”

“No,” Sansa says simply. “The North’s economy is small and we are still primarily an agricultural region. We have no debts, so we will not pay the ones the crown has brought on itself. As tariffs are there to protect the lesser economy, we will also be employing them on silver and timbre, and we would appreciate it if the Dragon Queen did not unfairly seek to punish the North in a way that would eventually bring us back into the fold, when she has promised us independence.”

Counter, parry, block.

Tyrion nearly smiles.

Sansa allows herself a long moment to shuffle through her papers, not quite collecting her thoughts, but making him wait just a little longer. “Ah, yes,” she says, “free movement of trade and labor would also be advisable. As for lands and borders,” she adds, leaning forwards and folding her hands in front of her. “The current heir to the Iron Throne must give up all claims to the Kingdom of the North through his paternal lineage. And the Iron Islands have always been a part of the North, that won’t change.”

Sansa lowers her gaze momentarily and sorrow floods her blue eyes. Theon Greyjoy’s last sacrifice had been for the Starks, and she must be attempting to honor that.

It cuts straight through him, that expression. All the way back to her sorrow in King’s Landing, on top of Winterfell’s walls. And Tyrion wishes there was something he could say or do to steal away that sorrow.

But when he glances across to her advisors, it’s clear they do not notice the ocean of grief within their queen. Instead they shuffle their own papers and one begins to speak.

“As for demands when it comes to acts of war,” he says, “we request a peace treaty to last a century. As well as—“

“If peace is what the North wishes for,” Tyrion cuts him off, “wouldn’t it be more beneficial for all parties involved if the North stayed in the Seven Kingdoms? Financially we would have a better chance of aiding one another, and as you’ve said, there are many things the North does not produce on its own, but has to import from the rest of Westeros.”

It’s nearly inaudible, but Tyrion still hears it. The quiet exhalation of a breath. A laugh.

When Tyrion’s head swivels back at the sound, the sorrow is gone from her eyes once more, replaced by silent laughter.

“That might be true if we were Lannisters,” she counters. “But our goals were never to enrich ourselves. Certainly, we will need to be able to trade properly with the southern kingdoms, but the North has the greatest sources of silver and iron in all the Seven Kingdoms.

“But more importantly, what we desire is to be free of the crown’s interference with families. We no longer desire that the south dictate or invest in who holds land where, nor who demands power in our Northern houses. That also means,” she adds, blue eyes flashing dangerously, “that there will be no marriage deals brokered. That practice will be ended in the North.”

Oh.

Tyrion nearly wants to laugh.

He really has been a fool.

A goodhearted fool, he flatters himself. A fool that can’t handle what Sansa Stark has been through, a fool who’s been to scared to imagine what he had not already seen. Joffrey. Littlefinger. Ramsey. Humilation, beatings, and rape. All he’d done was hide himself away from these truths, for fear of feeling his own heart tremble with rage. And as a result? As a result he’d forgotten something fundamental, and he’d acted in ignorance.

Sansa. Daenerys. Cersei. It’s no wonder they’d never been able to trust one another. Kings and queens had controlled their lives and used them as broodmares for their houses. They’d had no sovereignty or say in how their lives would take shape, and when they’d tried to stand up for it, they’d been beaten down again and again. Until they’d had to become something else, something ruthless and impulsive, unforgiving and capable of washing their hands in the blood of their enemies.

And Tyrion had stupidly wanted to marry Daenerys to Jon Snow for an easy peace?

He’d grasped at control because it’s what he’d seen and experienced on his own body. But he’d seen what it did to others, and he should have known better.

Even if he’d excused it with love…

His eyes fall on the chain still hanging around Sansa’s neck, and his palms ache with the memory of golden chains. He clutches them under the table in an attempt to stop the trembling in his soul. Lowers his face for a fraction of a second. “Of course,” he says. “Shall we return to the military demands and the rest before we begin negotiating in earnest?”

* * *

The chain returns.

Sansa Stark wears her chain as proudly as if it were an emblem. And if the gods were kind, he’d think she knew. He’d think she’s doing it to rattle him, to provoke him. But the gods aren’t kind. The gods are cruel. And so he doubts that she knows. He thinks she may have figured out about Shae in retrospect—thinking otherwise would be underestimating Sansa, after all. But Shae has vanished with the waves of time, and history does not pay attention to the actions of those who sell their bodies to survive.

No. The gods are cruel.

And Sansa must be wearing her chain for her own reasons.

She’d worn it in Winterfell, as well.

But there had been too much else to think about, too many ploys and plots. She had been different. So different. A warrior draped in leather plating, who speaks only her own brutal honesty, even at her own peril. And he’d been entranced by her intellect, intent on attempting to learn who she was now that she’d stopped hiding behind her armor of courtesy. And terrified for her life at the hands of his own queen.

So he hadn’t been paying attention. Again.

There had been other wishes and desires at play, and he’d been too busy arming himself against them. Reminding himself again and again of where his loyalties ought to lie, staying true to the person who had chosen him, and not forgetting that whatever had happened in the crypt, he cannot let himself hope. That there is no hope.

He had made sure of that himself, and she had made him perfectly aware the moment she’d turned from him during the feast at Winterfell, come the victory of the Dawn. He had honored her words, and he’s guarded his heart, and he’d _made a choice_.

Tyrion sighs, and drops two drafts of the peace treaty into the fireplace of his study. Sansa has already proven herself both predictable and unpredictable during their meetings. He can predict mostly what she will do for her people and her house, the types of trade agreements she will want, but then she redefines what freedom is, and—

The chain intrudes again.

“Why would somebody so intent on gaining freedom for her people willingly place a chain around her throat every morning?”

Tyrion tastes the words, tries to speak them out loud. And then shakes his head.

He would only see Ned Stark’s frost in her face, and be reminded that he’s overstepping his boundaries by asking. Sansa Stark sees his questions and inquiries coming a mile away, even when he veils them with wit or intrigue and she has never answered him, never let down her guard, where he had not done it in return.

But he is of little use to her now. And there is nothing he can give her that she wants, nothing he can barter in return for answers.

Not of himself anyway, when she already sees straight through him, as she had done since the moment they met again in Winterfell.

Varys’ raven scroll lies like a taunt, a temptation, on his desk, and Tyrion picks it up again.

 _Curiosity often wins the battle against dignity_ …

* * *

 

It is with surprising ease that he locates the Queen in the North in the early afternoon. The sun hangs low on the sky, threatening to sink quickly, as it always does, leaving darkness to accompany the winter colds, like a lord never leaves the side of his lady. But for now it illuminates the pale blue of an open sky, and laughter echoes from the courtyard unexpectedly.

Tyrion pauses on his way to his guest’s chambers to peer out the windows, thanking his ancestors for investing in grandiose amounts of Myrish glass that covers the walls from floor to ceiling so he doesn’t have to embarrass himself by standing on tip toes. Down in the courtyard a pair of knights in grey and black wool have started a snow ball fight with the children of the castle. There’s at least a dozen children in the castle, and this high up it’s impossible to discern which ones are lordlings and which ones are the children of servants from the frey, but it matters little at the sight of such joy.

As he makes it into the courtyard, a girl with dark brown hair lobs a massive snowball straight into the face of a boy with golden hair, and he topples over backwards in the snow.

This time Tyrion can tell, as can all the others, the rank of the children, and there’s a moment of silence as the courtyard holds their collective breath.

Until Sansa Stark begins to laugh. It’s neither loud nor intrusive, but it rings out in the silence like winter bells.

The boy brushes aside the snow from his face and he sits up to glare owlishly at the girl.

And now Tyrion can’t help but laugh either, joining Sansa’s voice before it can die, and their collective joy seems to get to the children, for suddenly every one of them are laughing as well, so even the boy at the centre of it all can’t help but crack a smile.

“Well done, Lyon,” Tyrion says, “you just proved to our Stark friends that even Lannisters can be forgiving.”

It warms his heart a little to see his little nephew flutter with pride at his praise, as if he was never the hated Imp. As if his family actually cares for and respects him. If he were fanciful or some of his more romantic notions remained for himself, he might have thought he’d entered another realm, a parallel time, where there had been no Tywin nor Cersei to torment him, where Lady Sansa smiles benevolently in a winter landscape still his, and here because she’d wanted him.

But Tyrion is no romantic and he has no fanciful notions left over for himself. And so, he knows he has to build a better world and a better house for the children that come after the terror and the cruelty of his father and sister. He knows that whatever smile he sees on Sansa Stark’s face is there because she’d built a foundation of safety and power for herself.

She’s gathered some of the quieter children around her and where her knights at taught the rest how to play proper war with snow balls, she’s teaching them how to build complex snow forts. The children direct her hands as she digs trenches and hills, and she listens with a benevolent smile gracing her lips. She nods and asks questions, taking care that every child is heard in turn.

And Tyrion watches silently, his heart running over with the sweetest honey. It nearly hurts how perfect she is, the ideal lady in every conventional sense of the word. Beautiful, talented, artistic and well articulated. Somebody who adores children with as much fervor as himself. A ruler beyond his wildest imaginings, who is kind and loyal to her people.

How could the gods set her on such a cruel path?

“I haven’t done this since I were in the Eyrie,” she’s telling the children. “I had a lot of time to myself there, so it was a good way to distract my thoughts.”

They gape at her in silent awe, leaning back on their heels as if their entire bodies need to express their emotions. “You’ve been to the Eyrie?!”

“Yes,” Sansa says, “the Lord Arryn is my cousin on my mother’s side. I spent some time there when the Boltons controlled my own ancestral home.”

She has them entranced now, constellations dancing in their minds, and fairy tales spinning in their minds.

“How did the Boltons come to control your ancestral home?”

“But I thought the Boltons were all dead?”

“Does that mean someone took it back for you?”

And Sansa smiles a smile of secrecy and pride. She leans forwards as if she’s imparting some great secret and says, “I took it back myself. The whole North. With my people.”

“But _how_?” one boy exclaims, his golden hair dancing in the chill wind, his ignorance on his sleeve. “Women can’t fight, or command an army.”

The others frown at him, at his imprudent honesty. But Sansa simply smiles. “Why not?” she says. “My sworn sword is a woman fiercer even than Ser Jaime was. And my sister killed the Night King.”

“Northerners are also cut from a different cloth than the rest of us,” Tyrion cuts in. He grins impishly when they all spin to look at him, surprised that he’d snuck up on them without being noticed. “They have a different sense of honor and duty to House Stark. Money can’t buy their hearts, and they remember their oaths for millennia.”

The boy frowns. “But the lion is also loyal to its House.”

“Yes,” Tyrion allows. “To its own House. A House we tricked our way into, if I remember my own history. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Lannisters win the riches of the world, but Starks. The Starks know how to win the hearts of men.”

He catches Sansa’s gaze as he says the last, her blue eyes soft and pale as a winter sky. Her smile falls, but the softness remains. And for a moment, as she doesn’t look away, as she meets him halfway in silent understanding, Tyrion feels the world fall away until there is only snow and winter and Sansa Stark. Colour in the midst of all the white.

But it all burns through him too quickly, consumes him to the point of pain. A rush of emotion that nearly tears him apart from the inside. And Tyrion isn’t ready for it, doesn’t have the strength for it. So he is the first to look from her face, to the work of her hands.

By their feet stands a perfect replica of Casterly Rock and Lannisport all made of snow, complete with lions guarding the gates and bridges connecting the Rock to the continent.

“Lady Stark,” he says, his voice morphing into tones of mock astonishment, “you wouldn’t be planning a siege of my ancestral home, would you?”

As the children snicker around them, Sansa smirks. “If I were, I believe I’d need a better view of the outside than the one I gained upon first entry, wouldn’t you say? As the only one who’s ever planned a successful siege of this place.”

She smiles that smile full of secrets once more, and he wonders how much Davos and Jon Snow had told her of the secret passages leading into the Rock, and their original purpose. The echo of her childlike jokes from King’s Landing comes back to him then, and he nearly laughs again.

 _I hear_ you’re _a pervert._

No. His former lady wife has few illusions about his character.

“I would be honored to provide you with just the right view to plan such a siege,” he japes.

* * *

The blood of the First Men and the Free Folk rests in the veins of every Stark.

The Tully blood has done nothing to temper the wild Northern hunger for freedom, which Sansa makes clear as soon as they leave the Lion’s Gate behind. As if she throws off a heavy burden, she turns her head back to grin at Tyrion before urging her horse into a gallop.

The snows have begun to fall gently against a sunset sky, and the light catches in her red hair when her hood falls down. And he suddenly recognizes her for what she is. A Stark. Like little Arya, whom he’d caught practicing with bow and arrow one day during his first visit to Winterfell. Like his faint memories of Lyanna Stark in Harrenhall, putting half the knights to shame with her own horse riding.

A wolf cannot be tamed or tempered.

It can be held captive and made docile for a time.

But that doesn’t change what it is.

When she returns to his side again her cheeks are red with the exercise and the cold wind, and there are snow flakes in her hair. Decorations purerer than the most expensive pearls of Essos. She tells him of their work on demolishing the wall, of the adventures of their wildling allies. She calls them Free Folk, and there is cheerful respect in her voice.

“You almost sound like you want to join them further up North,” he observes.

And she looks _at_ him, and he’s never loved his horse as much as he does in this instance. For they are the same height on horse back, and he can forget his malformation here, as he often does under her gaze these days.

“Why wouldn’t I? The North is beautiful, Tyrion,” she says. “Even in winter, there is a beauty to the landscapes. The snows fall like blankets over the land, hiding all the ugliness the summer muds brought with them so we can no longer see the traces of war or death. The ice shape like fragile diamonds, and there is something sorrowful about how they never last, but it makes you appreciate them all the more.

“Not that,” she adds, glancing away, “life in winter is easy. We try not to waste our food, and we care for each other the best way we can. But the cold will take the weary, no matter how hard we try. That’s why I want to go further north,” she adds.

And although there had been a melancholic beauty to the fairy tale she had spun at first, he loves her all the more for seeing the reality in front of her. For acknowledging that life is not a minstrel’s song, and for doing the best she can for her people.

“The Free Folk know ways to survive in the North that we have forgotten,” she continues, her eyes sharp with determination. “Tormund has been teaching me some of it, but I want to go North and see it for myself. If I can. If there is time, when spring comes.”

“And if not?”

“If not, I will send somebody else.”

The words of Ned and Catelyn Stark linger in the silence between them. _There must always be a Stark in Winterfell._

She had refused to come all the way South to King’s Landing for the negotiations, and though she had given her formal reasons why, they had been arguments veiled in logic to hide the fact that no head of the Stark family has ever survived the trip to King’s Landing. Even herself. Twice she had been forced by the will of others to make the trip South, and twice it had caused her pain and heartache. It had been the fourth time she’d been a prisoner.

They had all been stupid enough to assume that taking the entire army of the North and the Vale south. They had all been foolish enough to underestimate the cunning of his sister. And as a result Winterfell had fallen with ease, again. Not to the army of the dead, but to a small force of Cersei’s expert design. Chained, like Missandei, she had nearly died the prisoner she had never deserved to be. Because they hadn’t listened to her in the first place.

And Jon. Jon had lost his life in the battle to bring his sister back safe, cradled in a shroud of crimson, fingers raised to draw blood across her cheek, and _I’m sorry for never listening_ the last words on his lips.

Once again, Tyrion had looked into the eyes of Sansa Stark and felt the ocean of her sorrow wash him away.

It seems impossible that she should ever again find the courage or the strength of spirit to travel south once more.

The lions on either side of the gates to Lannisport tower over them both, one paw raised in greeting. The winter snows have stolen their gold, and softened the fierceness of their spirits, great white beasts now, painted in the soft, pale orange of a winter sunset.

Though the sun is on its way down, people here are still in the streets. Strolling or running. A boy hurrying with a message from one store to the next, an elderly couple enjoying the sunset, a woman trying to calm her wailing child. Business is still being conducted behind myrish glass, and the clang of smiths still working on gold, bronze or iron echoes down the streets, and food is cooking from the confines of the domestic to the open inns so Lannisport smells of an open feast.

Sansa’s gaze lingers with wonder at the people here, their smiles and ease of mind, in spite of winter’s coming. She doesn’t quite smile, but her blue eyes dance as if she wants to, and for once Tyrion can see the girl of nineteen that she still is under the crown, youth that still finds beauty in the world in spite of its horrors. Innocence that hasn’t been entirely shattered.

The tallest tower in the city is both a maester’s library, as well as a watchtower. It’s tall enough that guards can catch pirate ships or invading forces nearly a day before they might hit the port. The second tallest tower, however, faces the Rock and has been turned into a lavish inn. Its lower floors house the guests, but the top floor is one huge dining area, the walls almost entirely replaced by Myrish glass, and, luckily for Tyrion, the innkeeper had made an expensive deal with the local artificers for a contraption that carries customers to their desired floor so they don’t have to take the stairs.

The footman by the large cage in glass and gold, halt Sansa and Tyrion’s knights and shakes his head. “I apologize, my lord, my lady,” he says, “but the cage may only carry two individuals at a time.”

And there’s that awkward moment, when Tyrion realises that they are no longer married. “Of course,” he says, taking a step back and lifting his hand to offer her the lift. “Ladies first.”

“Don’t be silly,” Sansa says and grabs his wrist, dragging him along before he can protest.

The footman’s face is a carefully concealed mask of deference as he closes the door for them and pulls the lever. And Tyrion sits awkwardly in one of the luxurious seats of the cage, as it carefully, silently crawls up, up, and up on chains probably buttered with ridiculous amounts of oil for the audial pleasure of the inn’s guests.

“Uh, My lady…”

Sansa tilts her head to the side to regard him with cool blue eyes. “Do you plan on mistreating me before we reach the top of the tower?”

“Of course not,” comes the immediate reply. It’s an old reflex, one born of repeated frustrations at having that single question thrown at him again and again for weeks and months.

But perhaps its not been all for naught, perhaps its the best response he could have given, heated anger sparked on kindling forever dry, because Sansa’s expression softens, the ice melts away, and she smiles.

“Of course not,” she repeats.

And it hits him, out of nowhere, like a punch in the gut, how much she’s changed. This isn’t the frightened child who’d stared at him with great blue eyes and never heard his hatred and disdain of his own family, though it had been there in his every word. This isn’t the resentful dreamer, who’d had her wings cut, her family stolen from her, who refused to see him past his name.

She’d grown up somewhere down the road. She’d learnt to use her observations on people to her advantage, had learnt to connect them and interpret them, and her sense of justice guides her now more than ever. Sansa Stark has become the woman he’d only seen the shadow of, in her expert lies and armor of courtesy, in the moment when she’d picked up Joffrey’s goblet and offered it to him. And the woman who sits in front of him now, queen and regent that she is, sees right through him to his habits and his thoughts, to his heart. Sansa Stark _knows_ him, exactly as he is, and it should be frightening to be seen through.

But she doesn’t look away from him.

Perhaps that’s all the courage he ever needed.

Quiet conversation and candle light mark the atmosphere on the top floor, where lower Lannister nobility, tradesfolk from Essos and the Free Cities, and ladies on holiday, artists on their Grand Tour, and young maesters of rich birth take their supper. The subtle aroma of spices and cooked vegetables add life to the cream and red velvet and old mahogany, crowned with intricate golden decorations. But the crowning glory of the place is the view of Casterly Rock on the coast, lit up from below in shades of gold against the blue of the coming night.

The footman on duty, ready to greet them, starts to see Tyrion step out of the cage.

“My Lord Lannister,” he nearly stutters. “We were not informed you would be patronising us this evening.”

“Spur of the moment decision,” Tyrion quips. “I trust my usual table is open.”

“Of course, my lord, and—“

The footman looks to Sansa, and for a moment his mask falls entirely away at the beauty that has chosen to accompany Tyrion, so clearly of noble birth, that Tyrion himself nearly can’t control his laughter.

“This,” he says, “is Her Grace, Sansa Stark. The Queen in the North.”

The utter panic that erupts after this statement is all he can do not to roll on the floor and laugh with glee. And Sansa, bemused and a little exasperated, nudges his shoulder. “Show off,” she mutters.

When he looks up at her there is a flush to her cheeks that he’s rarely seen before. “My lady, if you don’t show off, no one will grovel to you,” he reminds her cheerfully. “And your position definitely deserves groveling.”

“This is already technically a kingdom,” she protests once they are seated. “If you are a frequent patron here, they ought to be used to kings already.”

“Kingdom in name only.”

He gets a look for the correction.

“You wouldn’t be trying to convince me to betray my queen, would you?” he half jokes. “I’m afraid not everyone are as privileged to see our queen’s forgiveness on that front. And it the West broke free, the rest of the kingdoms would sniff out weakness faster than your precious dire wolves.”

“Yes,” Sansa sighs. “Weakness comes with no allies, and little support.”

She falls silent, her eyes drifting to the outside display of power that Casterly Rock has always symbolized. In the descending darkness it glows all the brighter, its soft light casting glitter and gold across the waves. And Tyrion uses her quiet as a chance to order their food and drinks, from a footman who’s finally regained his confidence.

“Doesn’t it cost a lot of firewood?” she says, when they are alone once more. “Keeping it lit like that.”

“Spoken with all the prudence of Ned Stark’s eldest daughter,” he japes.

“Tyrion.”

“My grandfather used it as a way to show off our wealth,” he sobers, “firewood is precious in the winter, so it was a good ploy at intimidating our enemies. By the time my father was ready to remove what he considered a foolish practice and waste of gold, the fisher folk and trades people had become accustomed to using it as a landmark at night, so he had little choice but to keep it up or risk the wrath of half his population.”

Sansa raises an eyebrow. “I never got the impression that Tywin Lannister did anything to please the people around him.”

“No,” Tyrion agrees. “In reality, my lord father only left the lights on because the loss in fishing income from the loss of night fishing was greater than the loss his treasuries incurred by the excessive use of firewood.”

The wine arrives, a sweet red from Lys, which ought to soothe the ache from the spices in the food. Sansa thanks the man who serves them, courtesy always her first priority, but her pensive gaze is quickly drawn back to Casterly Rock, observing every nook and cranny.

“With how closely you’re observing the Rock,” Tyrion jests, “I might actually begin to fear you were being true to your word when you said you were planning a siege.”

A smile, slow as a cat’s. “No, I was just thinking that it is a beautiful sight. Casterly Rock at night.”

“Well, it’s not King’s Landing at night.”

Sansa blinks, before she turns back to meet his gaze. “How do you know about that?”

As she speaks she leans back in her seat, fingers folded together in her lap, and there’s suddenly something vulnerable about her. The soft pale blue cloth of her gown and the dark furs seem to accentuate the chain around her neck, suddenly.

“Varys told me,” Tyrion admits quickly to appease her. “Before… my father’s interference, he was doing his best to watch over you, so he had a list ready of things that might put you at ease down south. I assure you, my lady, I did not request it.”

Sansa exhales silently, and the anxiety leaves, though her gaze remains blue with sorrow. “You didn’t request it,” she repeats. And it’s not a question, not really. So Tyrion remains silent, awaits her verdict as has often been the case these past few days.

He is no longer afraid of her silences, he trusts that they are not her way of rejecting him anymore. He knows her silence is no longer a wall he cannot overcome. Instead he recognizes them for what they are; a mind full of thoughts and calculations, digging up old observations and half-finished analyses that now make sense.

Finally, she unfurls her fingers and leans towards him. “And here I thought, my lord, that you were showing off your home so I would regret leaving it behind.”

His quick wit doesn’t save him. “Oh, now I’m ‘my lord’.”

It doesn’t save him, because Sansa breaks into a genuine smile, full of mischievous cheer and victorious delight, blue eyes cringing at the edges and she _glows_. And Tyrion—

Tyrion is so _lost_.

Because Sansa knows exactly what she is doing and saying and implying. And there is a _no_ in her words that is also a _yes_. There is a refusal to give up who she is to herself and her people, but within that self she is leaving space for him. She’s offering him a _choice_ , again. And she is so beautiful, with her quick wit, her subtle words, and her honest smile. And, in a moment of madness, Tyrion thinks he would give up anything to be able to see that smile every day, to be able to make her smile so brightly.

“Yes, I think this is what I imagined, after all,” Sansa says, looking back out at the Rock. “The sea and the land, the golden lights and the city falling down towards the castle. It’s smaller, but I’d never seen a true city before, anyway. I thought it could be my home, once upon a time.”

 _It could be a home_ , rests unsaid on his lips. _It will always be your home._

But he knows a lie without saying it. The North is her only home, and attempting to convince her otherwise would be to lie futilely. And yet, he cannot help but give himself away again, cannot help but find a way to breach the gap.

“I never believed that you would leave the Westerlands with anything less than the Independence of the North,” he says. “But I had hoped that if I spoiled you, you would miss it enough to come back.”

Her smile is a secret, before she hides it by the goblet of sweet wine.

* * *

As they dine and talk, free from politics and interference from the outside world, the wind from inland picks up and the snow begins to fall, heavy flakes obscuring the outside world until darkness swallows them all.

Sansa watches the chaos for a while, her blue eyes far off, before she waves for the nearest footman. “Prepare separate chambers for the Lord Lannister and myself, preferably ones with space for our guard as well,” she says. “And have water sent up for baths once we leave.”

The footman looks from Sansa to Tyrion, but Tyrion simply smiles and lifts his goblet of wine. “And have more of this fine Lysene wine sent up to my chamber,” is all he says. “Her Grace knows her winter storms, and if she deems it safest for us to stay, we stay, of course.”

“As you wish.”

The fireplace is roaring away in the chamber provided for him, and Tyrion soon finds himself sinking gratefully into the warm tub provided for him by the inn. He closes his eyes and feels the fuzzy pleasure of good memories wash over him, and keeps them closed when a servant arrives with robes.

He can’t even bring himself to be annoyed when the younger man begins to apologize that they don’t have robes prepared for dwarves.

“Leave them,” he sighs. “I’ll fold the legs and sleeves.”

He can hear his guards snickering at the expense of the servant as he stumbles out, more afraid of Tywin Lannister’s ghost than he is of Tyrion himself. It’ll fade as time passes, or so he hopes.

It bothers him. He doesn’t want it to bother him. But it bothers him none the less. He shouldn’t have told her why he knew about her romanticisms of King’s Landing. Sansa hated her time in King’s Landing, she hated the way her live was being controlled like a puppet on a string. And the more he learns of Littlefinger’s interference, the less he can blame her. Getting her out of King’s Landing, only to sell her off to the Boltons? If it’s Petyr Baeslish we’re talking about, there must be more to the story than just that, and he doesn’t doubt that Sansa has picked up the pieces by now. Even if Tyrion can’t see the dusty spider nets clearly.

Letting it slip that Baelish wasn’t the only one, that another spider had kept tabs on her life, and likely influenced it…? And that he’s still attempting to influence it?

No. He shouldn’t have said anything.

Tyrion just has to hope that she will forgive him his backhanded attempts at making her smile, that she won’t look back on this with resentment.

But there are other things to worry about, such as the fact that no raven will be able to pass through the current storm to the Rock. Hopefully, the Northerners will be as wise as their lady and realise they’d gotten stuck, rather than become unnecessarily suspicious.

As soon as he’s crawled out of the bath and dressed, he scribbles a note, irritably refolding the sleeve of his shirt more than once as he goes. And when he’s done, he waddles across the room to the door.

“Dougal, as soon as the storm calms bring this to— Lady Sansa.”

She tilts her head curiously for a moment before plucking the note from him with her free hand. “I take it you meant the Rock?”

“Uh. Yes. What are you—“

But she ignores him, pushing his door open and striding across the room straight for his carafe of expensive, sweet wine from Lys. Tyrion looks from Sansa to his guards, and the two men grin down at him with more understanding than Tyrion’s own brain is allowing him.

Only when he hears the heavy _thump_ of Stark furs being dropped to the floor on the fireplace does it dawn on him what she’s doing.

“I hope you’re only here to steal my wine,” he japes futilely.

“No.”

Sansa strides back the way she’d come, clean white skirts billowing only to be replaced by a simple red gown. _Lannister red_ , his mind supplies cruelly. (Except, it isn’t. Of course, it isn’t. It’s just the standard colors of the inn, to show off its allegiance to his House). And she hands the carafe to the Dougal, as well as the note and a deck of cards.

“Your bribe,” she informs him cheerfully.

“My lady, you cannot be serious,” he pleads as the door falls closed, and he isn’t sure what he pleads for. Perhaps his own sanity. “Think of your reputation.”

That gives her pause. And she does flush a little at the insinuation, the expectation as to what her intentions are. It crawls prettily into her cheeks and stays there, her gaze wavering with embarrassment that hides the fear that still trembles at her core.

“I’m not here for that, Tyrion,” she reassures him.

And Tyrion feels an instant stab of guilt and self-hatred. It tastes like bile in his mouth. How could he have made such an assumption? She has never wanted him before, so why would she want him now? Haunted by war, more scarred than ever. More a _Lannister_ than ever, and still very much a loyal support of his own queen. How could she want him when he is still thirteen years her elder, and when all men has ever done was hurt her?

How could he expect—

Cool fingers touch his jaw, near his scar. And it’s so sudden, so natural that he nearly flinches away.

When his head flies up she’s right in front of him, sitting perched on her toes at his height. And she doesn’t quite smile. “I want to teach you something,” she says.

“Teach,” he begins, mind reeling. And he can’t quite let go of the guilt and the shame, returning again to the implications at the very least of her actions. “Sansa. No matter what you’re here for, it ought to wait until the morn—“

“A widow’s reputation is not the same as that of a maiden,” she cuts him off, and adds almost childishly. “And, anyway, it doesn’t work as well in daylight.”

Tyrion’s lips quirk in a smile he can’t quite suppress, and he can’t help himself. “I’m almost certain there’s no night time activity you could teach me I don’t already know, my lady,” he japes.

“Cut it out,” she restorts, the flustered red in her cheeks never touching the sternness in her voice. “You’ve shown off the riches and pleasures of the Rock, but I want to teach you what makes the snow, the cold and the howling winds worth it.”

She rises to her feet, the red and white silks of her gown billowing with her quick movements, and charges to the nearby table where a hairbrush rests with more purpose than a foot solider in the middle of battle. And Tyrion knows that no matter what he says, no matter how he might argue or joke to protest that the winters of Westeros could never be worth it, he’s already lost to her. As he always does.

He knows, when she grabs his hand and gently tugs him in the direction of the floor, the furs and the fireplace, that he will never win, that there is no saying ‘no’ to Sansa Stark. She tugs him along with as much ease as the moon tugs the oceans, and he would orbit her like a star for eternity if she would only let him.

She drops another log in the fire before sitting down at his side, facing his profile. With deft fingers she spreads out the blankets and the furs over them, tugging them down before Tyrion’s awkward hands can begin to aid her, as if she’s done this a thousand times before.

“Your hair is still damp.”

And as her pale white fingers dig into his unruly curls that he hasn’t bothered to get cut since Daenerys’ coronation, Tyrion thinks he forgets to breathe. He isn’t glass under her hands, nowhere near as fragile as she makes him feel. Neither is he a monster to be feared, to be touched with trembling fingers. He is real and solid under her touch, as she explores his curls and tangles.

“You need to brush and dry it properly in winter or you might catch your death.”

And her voice is a lullaby, is the softest song. It curls around him like a caress and Tyrion thinks he might get lost in it, forget himself in it.

They say the pleasures and tastes of Lys are countless, that men lose themselves in the city never to be found. But though Tyrion has seen the Free Cities, has tasted their wine, it is his lady that could spirit him away, that makes him drunk from a single innocent touch, it is his lady that he might forget his duties in. He just hopes there isn’t poison waiting for his heart at the end of all of this.

“I like this length,” she comments idly, as she pulls the brush gently through his hair.

“Why?”

Perhaps he is just a large cat. Maybe if he closed his eyes he might find the powers of a skin changer, turn into a lion. A little lion is fine, if lions sire dwarfs. He’d be just the right size to curl up in her lap, purring.

It’s hard to be a cynic when Sansa Stark is touching him like family.

“The curl is a better of expression of your character,” she explains. “Impossible to tame.”

He snorts softly. “You give me too much credit, my lady,” he counters. “My father kept me tamed most of my life.”

“And yet, you broke free.”

“I also let myself become a slave for a while.”

“And yet, you broke free. Turn.”

Tyrion cracks an eye open to peer up at her, only to find her smiling mischievously at him. “You play some odd games, my lady,” he observes, but does as he’s told.

“I don’t play games anymore,” she counters. “I don’t have to play games anymore to survive.”

She carefully negotiates with the last of his curls before putting the brush aside, but Tyrion has a sudden idea. “My turn,” he says, climbing from the warm confines of her furs to his feet. And before she can protest that her hair is already brushed, he grins and says “I was always Princess Myrcella’s favorite handmaid when she was a child, believe it or not. I have just the right height for it, too.”

Now it’s Sansa’s turn to peer up at him, and it’s odd that she should be lower than him. It almost feels wrong. But when she turns her back to him and silently trusts him to touch her, he can no more deny himself the simple pleasure, than he could deny her anything.

It’s not quite a relief to run is fingers carefully under her thick mane of rich velvet, but it’s close. His muscles relax and he exhales a breath he’s held for years, quietly and carefully. He marvels at the way the red reflects the gold of the candle light, a luxury over his fingers, but heavy all the same. It’s so much thicker, too, than he remember from their time in King’s landing, as if it has grown with her spirit and her courage. Almost like a wolf changing its pelt for winter.

The second time he lifts his hands, he carefully runs his fingers over her scalp, weaving them through her hair to tug it gently back. Sansa sighs at the simple pleasure and her shoulders visibly relax, and the mere fact nearly burns through him.

It’s chaste. And there is no coin involved. And yet this beautiful, wonderful, intelligent woman is letting him touch her, is enjoying his touch.

He prays to gods he doesn’t believe in that she doesn’t feel him tremble.

And like a miracle she warms to him, and begins to speak.

“That’s why I love the North so much,” she says. “People are honest to the point that it might have cost them their lives in the capital. And they are loyal. You always know what a Northerner is thinking, even if it’s a rude thought. They show deference to their lords by speaking frankly and openly, and it is our duties to consider them seriously.

“These are people I can let my guard down around. These are people I don’t have to worry are trying to guide me down the wrong path, or control my life.”

Tyrion holds his breath as he begins to negotiate with her willful hair, waiting for her verdict. A thousand questions spring to mind all at once. _How much do you know? Truly, about your life in King’s Landing? What did they do to you beyond the Vale? How much did they hurt you? Why? Why do you trust me when I am neither honest nor open, when I have been another warden guarding your cage and controlling your life?_

When she doesn’t immediately continue, Tyrion finds himself speaking just to break the silence, just to hide his fear. “Then you are truly your father’s daughter.”

She straightens suddenly at his words, as if he’s hurt her, and she turnes partially around so the braid falls out of his hands. Her eyes are wide and blue, endless like the open sea. No. Glass is shutting down over her gaze, a tell, as if sorrow is threatening to spill over, as if she’s trying to control it, as if she’s desperate not to loose herself and pull back into a shell she’s cultivated for too many years.

It’s a war she wages with herself. A war she wins by speaking.

“What do you mean?” She begins. “I… I can’t be like father. I barely remember him. I learnt to lie too well and I spent too much time with Cersei, with Lord Baelish, and I’m—“

She cuts herself off, and he sees the way she pulls back, sees the shame and the fear on her face. And Tyrion’s heart hurts for her, hurts for the sudden sorrow and anxiety, the burden she’s carried around for months and months. He knows how her sentence ends, can read it in her face. But he can’t finish it for her.

“Sansa,” he says gently. “Look at me.”

He places a hand on her shoulder, fingers digging into the cloth, reaching for her flesh. She’d reminded him with a single touch that he was real, that he was not a monster. Nothing to fear. And he hopes he can do the same for her.

Slowly, she finds her courage again. Her mouth tightens around her fear, and she lifts her head to look into his eyes. Wide and blue, he can see himself reflected. He wonders how she could ever find her voice in his face, but she does. “What if I’m just like them?” she says, and there’s more strength in her voice than he would have expected. “I tried to manipulate Daenerys when she first arrived, I broke my promise to Jon. I— It’s so easy, and I’m afraid that there is nothing of me left.”

And this, more than anything, is the reason she has to remain a Stark. Always.

“I can’t tell you who you are,” he says as kindly as he can. “You have always remained a little of a mystery to me, and I’m starting to prefer it that way. Only you can truly define who you are, but… when we first arrived in Winterfell you spoke your father’s greeting to Robert Baratheon. You stood in your father’s place on the balconies and watched the work. You argued always for your people, no matter what danger it might place you in.

“And, Sansa,” he continues, carefully running his hand over her head, afraid he might frighten her like one frightens a skittish animal, “I wish I’d had the courage to listen to you. To listen to the wisdom Maester Aemon of the Night’s watch had once tried to teach me. _Eventually Starks are always right_. It might have spared us so many lives and so much tragedy in the war with Cersei.”

She smiles through the tears still watering her eyes, and nods. “You should have.”

And Tyrion can’t help but laugh. Perhaps it’s about time somebody lavished her with honest praise.

“Where _did_ you find the courage to say no to a Dragon Queen?”

Sansa Stark smiles and lifts her hand to dry her eyes. “Power resides where men believe it resides,” she quotes.

Tyrion’s hand stills against her hair before falling down to his side. He opens his mouth in astonishment, wondering where she’s heard Varys’ philosophy. And her mysterious smile returnes, as if she’s found her secrets again.

“But I’m not a man. I’m a woman,” she reminds him, “and I choose to give or take power, where I want it to belong.”

Confidence grows in her voice for every word she speaks, and though her eyes are red-rimmed, though she’s still pale against the caress of firelight, she she’s regained her strength and fierceness enough that he feels confident enough to jape

"Lady Stark, did you just call your former husband a coward?"

"I believe you called yourself a coward, Tyrion.”

Sudden, and unmistakable, the urge to lean forwards and capture her lips washes over him like a wave. It is not a new emotion. Tyrion always, _always_ wants to kiss her. But the force of the emotion is raw and overpowering, like a summer storm in Meereen, like an unruly ocean wave ready to wash him away.

For a single moment it’s painted on his face, he can see it in her eyes, the moment she sees it too. And Tyrion panics, mind rearing up like a frightened horse. “I don’t think I’d ever call myself such a thing, my lady,” he says, simultaneously letting his mouth run away with him and stuffing his foot in his mouth. “I once led a host through the Mud Gate of King’s Landing, and —“

Sansa grabs his hand and tugs him down to sit in front of her, but what really and truly shuts him up is Sansa lifting that same hand to her lips and kissing his fingers. “I know you’re brave,” she reassures him. “I’ve seen it myself, after all.”

Honey bleeds into his ribcage and begins to swallow his heart whole. She’ll never make him feel like a knight, but under the touch of her kindness he feels a little less like a monster. For every time she redefines what it means to be a hero, he thinks he might end up believing her.

“Somehow,” he tries to jape, but his voice is too raw, “I meant to comfort you, and instead you’re the one comforting me.”

Sansa cracks another smile. “See. There are things we can do in the darkness that I’m better at than you,” she retorts. She keeps her hand connected to his, and with her free one she offers him another blanket. “Tell me a story.”

He raises an eyebrow. “Why?”

“Because that’s what we do in the dark and the cold,” she says, “we learn the stories of the people we care about.”

“Then,” he counters, burrowing more thoroughly under the protection of the furs and blankets. “Tell me one of yours.”

* * *

Tyrion finds he works better in the library.

The study and the solar are rooms his Lord Father occupied like a force to be reckoned with, his presence somehow always larger than the rooms themselves. Terrifying and hateful. His ghost still lingers there now, some fierce expression or words meant to pierce his children, family or servants burning through Tyrion’s memories when he least expects them.

But the library. The library was always _his_. Tyrion’s. For as long as he’s been alive. Lannisters go there for information; they have specific goals in mind, facts that would aid them, old legacies to verify their ancient touch of gold. They come and go, never still. But Tyrion has always come here for pleasure, for quiet, and for solitude. Books hold stories just as people do, they honed his mind and made him _useful_ to other people. To the people who didn’t want him.

So he’s had an armchair pushed close to the fire, one designed with a footstool attached so his feet don’t dangle. Three small tables are spread out in front of him with papers and books stacked neatly, raven scrolls from the queen, and demands from the western lords. He leans over the nearest table, writing a proposal to Daenerys. A new one.

A different thought.

“What of religion?” one of the Northern lords had remarked.

“What of it?”

“The North answers to the old gods, my lord,” Sansa reminds him. “There is no reason the split from the Church of the Seven should not go smoothly.”

“And what of yourself, Your Grace? Your late Tully mother would not wish to see her eldest daughter lose her faith.”

The Queen in the North hesitates. And it is not faith that leaves her without an immediate answer. _I no longer prey_. It is her loyalty to her family and her House, her attempt always to honor the parents she barely remembers, their memory nothing but the love they left behind.

Tyrion thinks that might be the most powerful gift they could ever have left her.

“The Sept of Baelor was burnt by my sister,” he informs them. “Upon my return to King’s Landing I spoke with the High Septon in an attempt to figure out what we had lost. All the documents and history of the Great Houses were burnt in that attack. My monstrous sister, ironical as it may seem, might have done us one last favor; whatever duties we might have had to the past, we can redefine as we see fit now.”

“You mean,” she clarifies, meeting his gaze across the distance. And her eyes are bluer than anything he’s ever seen. “We have a choice.”

They know. Though the rest of her company does not. It’s no longer about religion or house or family. It’s finally come up, the question of their annulment. And Tyrion doesn’t know what she’s thinking, can’t see past her secrets. He can only wait for her to speak them, for Sansa to make up her mind about what she wants.

The sun filters pale and weak through the windows empty of warmth, yet a promise of its return. And Tyrion thinks, somehow, that he prefers the light of a fire or a candle. Not here, during the day, but at night. In silence. When light is a contrast to the dark, when it is a tiny world of warmth and comfort that keeps them safe.

That’s what she’d wanted to show him, of course. That winter colds are not as cold as southerners think. She’d said it without as many words, that there might be smiles and laughter in the sunlight, but in winter, when the white winds come, they are all that is left. Humanity. Family. And it forces people closer, forces them to care for one another. It’s something he’s never experienced with another person before, the simple touch of chaste intimacy, the coin he’d used had been himself, his own emotions, and the product he’d received in return a piece of the person he wants the most, private and all his own.

Her trust comes free of charge.

What he thinks she hadn’t meant for him to see, was the sunlight falling over her winter sweet skin in the morning, setting her hair aflame in a thousand different shades of gold and copper, deepened by shadows as dark as Dornish wine. Nor does he think it was her intention to rest her hand over his heart. He doesn’t remember that from the night before, doesn’t think anybody has ever reached out at night to reassure themselves that he is _alive_.

For the longest time he had simply rested on the floors of that inn, under all her furs and her blankets, his eyes lingering on her sleeping form. Unafraid. It’s something he’d never been able to do before, always scurrying from the bed before dawn, never able to look at his little wife for fear of how it might tear his heart. This might be the first time he’s ever allowed himself to act as he imagines a husband ought to.

_I am no fool._

And it might be the last time he’ll ever have the chance.

Tyrion groans and drops the quill back into the open bottle of ink. “This is why I’m not cut out for these negotiations.”

For so long he’s done what other people want of him. He’d convinced himself there was nothing of substance that he needed to ask for. People have never wanted to give themselves to him, after all. He’d learnt that from an early age. And he’d been rich; coin had bought him all that he wanted, all his simple pleasures. And then he’d given up on it, and he’d run away, and he’d given himself entirely to his service to somebody who always knew what she wanted and never took no for an answer.

And then he’d come back.

He’d walked the cold stones of Winterfell when Winter was its harshest. He’d breathed the dusty air of the crypts, surrounded by the dead. And he’d found someone who’d been lost to him, someone he’d never truly known, and in finding her once more, in learning to know her, something had awakened in him. Something he couldn’t control. Something that had blinded him.

Attachment.

Sometimes Podrick’s sorrowful song plays in his ear unbidden. When it does, Casterly Rock shatters in his mind, and he feels like a stranger in his own ancestral home.

The first time it had happened, he’d been in King’s Landing and he’d given up his title as Hand the same day to go home and remind himself of who he was.

It hadn’t worked.

She finds him here, amongst his books and his papers. Her gown in blues and blacks softens her steps, a water dancer without her sister’s training, and her red hair is decorated with delicate silver, a wintry contrast to the coppery waves. Her expression softens when she sees him, and her fingers fall from the books and their spines. There is something in her gaze, the first snow of a new winter.

“You are working,” she says.

And it is a statement, a fact. As if she doesn’t quite know what to do with it.

“You are not.”

It trembles between them, her intention. And though he cannot see it yet, he waits.

“There is only so much I can do this far from home,” she reminds him. Remorselessly she sits down in the chair opposite him, uncaring of his work. “Without our books and annals I can only make so many decisions. I’m trusting Sam and Arya and Bran to do what I cannot. Being here… is simultaneously like a holiday and work, all at the same time.”

Tyrion smiles. “Diversions are rarely a bad thing.”

She looks from his papers to his smile. “I’m glad we’re in agreement on that,” she says. “I found the Golden Gallery today.”

And suddenly they are no longer sitting in his library anymore. They are across from one another in a closed carriage on a hot day, but now she is present. Now there is no wall of ice and indifference. No. Not indifference. It had been fear all along. But even that is gone, replaced by something else. Something that isn’t quite security. Maybe hope.

How could he ever have thought her beautiful on that day? She had been a silent doll on the strings of other men. Now she speaks, and between her words are so many more, more than she could ever speak in a lifetime.

“Did it please you, my lady?”

She shakes her head and smiles. “This place pleases me so much more,” she says. “There are so many books I have never seen before. And they are all so well taken care of, even though some of them must have been here for generations.”

“You are welcome to any one of them,” he says, “if they please you.”

“They do.”

He expects her to get up, to explore the library. To hide away in a nook or a cranny, by the window with her furs, as he had always imagined her here. But instead she stays seated, instead she keeps watching him with those blue, blue eyes. Until he feels like he might wash away in her.

Finally she says, “I’m sorry, Tyrion. I don’t think I will ever be able to see Braavos with you.”

The fear that rises in him, the hateful voices that have too much power over his heart, are quick to tell him that this is a rejection, that finally she has found her voice to speak how ugly he is and how futile his hopes are. But she keeps looking at him with the softness of the first snow, and she keeps giving him hope. She is answering him, finally.

She remembers.

“My lady,” he begins, hesitantly, breathlessly, “I was only thinking of ways to get us away from Joffrey’s—“

“I know,” she cuts him off, not unkindly. “I understand.”

 _I see you_.

“You kept all your promises to me.”

“I didn’t—“

_I didn’t protect you. I didn’t take you away from Joff. I couldn’t even keep you safe from Cersei._

But he can’t speak his protests out loud. He can’t give away how much they have meant to him over the years, when they had never meant as much to her. _One flesh, one heart, one soul_. They were never anything but a chain to slowly strangle the life out of her, and he should not have held on as desperately as he had. The chains that had saved him from his own lonely despair.

Tyrion rubs the feeling of gold from his palms, and says, ridiculously, “you haven’t seen the Hall of Heroes yet, have you?”

“I have,” she says, “we found it together, remember?”

Some of the ice cracks away, as she reaches across the table and grabs one of his hands, gently massaging his palm. “Is the cold causing you trouble?”

And Tyrion stares up at her, as if he’s never seen her before. He wonders if this is some sort of trick after all. “What do you mean, we found it together?”

“The Hall of Heroes is the place where your family rests, isn’t it?”

Family. Not his House. Unbidden he feels her fingers under his lips and he sees the light of the candles making her face glow again.

_It’s the most heroic thing we can do now. Look the truth in the face._

The truth. What truth? What had he seen in her eyes that day, when nothing else had mattered because death had been right there waiting for them? It had been so much clearer in Gendry Baratheon’s face. So obvious in his brother’s face and in Ser Brienne’s face. In Tormund’s. It had made him _believe_ in something again, the desperate longing for somebody’s regard. Why can he see it so clearly in their eyes, when he cannot read it from her lips?

Is it because it’s not there?

Or because he’s too afraid to see it?

“You belong to the North, my lady,” he says, and his voice trembles.

“I do,” she says, her fingers trailing from his palm as she straightens up. “And I could not love the Rock. Not in this life.”

 _Not in this life_.

“Why not?”

She smiles her smile full of secrets. “Because I plan to gather everything and everyone precious to me where they are within easy reach. And the Rock is too far from Winterfell for that.”

“That is awfully greedy of you, my lady.”

“I am greedy,” she agrees. “Thank you for accommodating me so often.”

She picks up one of the old drafts for their treaties and scans the offers and claims he had predicted might be a possibility. And it tears through him, that she is not saying things directly, that she is not giving herself away. It was the same at Winterfell. Half truths and facts, warnings and kind words. Until he had pushed too far and she had reminded him of the line he has to cross willingly.

But Tyrion is afraid.

He doesn’t have the courage to jump into the sea and let the waves wash him away. He has always, always held on to land as best he could, for he knows he will perish amongst the peril of the waves.

“You’re so good at this,” she murmurs, putting down the draft only to pick up another.

“I don’t know, you seem to be countering my every move and suggestion,” he retorts, at the end of his rope. “And I couldn’t predict what demands you would make.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” she murmurs. “I would hate to be seen through entirely.”

Tyrion’s eyes fall on the chain around her neck again, and he wonders _again_ if she’s taunting him, mocking him. If she’s poking holes in his heart just to get the best possible deal out of him. It frustrates him. Simmering at first, but suddenly reaching a boiling point he can’t contain.

“That’s right, I can’t see through you,” he exclaims. “I can’t figure you out. What is it you _want_ , Sansa? Why are you _here_?”

“I want the North,” she responds in the same tone, slamming the treaty down on the table between them. “I want what is mine, what is my people’s, in the way that will benefit them the most. That is not an unacceptable thing to demand.”

“Is that all you want?” he pushes, his voice quieting because the worst of his frustration boils down to _this_ and he trembles with his own fear. He is acting as his father would, drawing her attention back on him before falling quiet, and it makes him twice the monster he usually feels. Possessed by the snow and the golden ghosts, Casterly Rock the only place that can force such behavior on him.

Maybe it’s just the way of the heads of House Lannister.

_Hear me roar._

“What about you?” she retorts, countering his question and redirecting his attention. She gestures to the table. “You’re always making sure you can provide what others want. First your family, then your Dragon Queen. But what about you, Tyrion? What do _you_ want?”

 _You. I want you_. _I’ve always wanted you_ , _but I cannot tell you that_ _if you have not seen it._

How can she see through him to this degree, how could she observe him and analyse him so closely, and not see that she’s all he’s ever really wanted? To the point of heartache and distracted political schemes. To the point of putting himself in danger for her sake, risking his neck for her her sake, giving up his titles for her. If only he hadn’t wanted her so damn much, perhaps he’d been able to see the truth in her words during the war, perhaps he would have found the courage to side with her and perhaps he could have empowered her to make Daenerys see sense. Perhaps then Cersei wouldn’t have hurt her. Perhaps then Jon Snow wouldn’t be dead.

But looks at the chain around her neck, and he’s just frustrated enough, angry enough with himself not to care about the consequences.

_Here’s a truth for you, Lady Stark._

“If I were to denounce my claims to Casterley Rock, what would you do?”

Sansa stares back at him, eyes wide and blue. But she is taking in his words, turning them over and considering how they mold into her own opinions and wishes. She is seeing him and hearing him, and she is so very present. And for all that might come of this, all that might hurt him because he held his hand out to her again, he is grateful for just this. This time, he won’t turn away. This time he will stand his ground and he will wait, trusting her to reach back, as she had done it that very first time.

You have protected yourself too long, my lady. Enough half words and lies. Enough wanting simply to please. There is no war and there is no dragon queen digging her claws into me anymore. You have to make a choice, and what I want is your honest response.

“Why?”

“I’m the last living heir to the Rock. It seemed like an appropriate final insult to my Lord Father beyond the grave,” he quips immediately and on reflex. “Especially if I were to give it up for a Stark. Of course, it would benefit Winterfell more if I were to give my riches to it, but that would demand you swear your fealty to the Queen of the Iron Throne. And I know that will never happen.”

He remembers her games from Winterfell all too well. No, they are not quite games. They are refusals to play, to let herself be misdirected by his words and is stories. Sansa has always seen through those, and she’s always only demanded that he give something of himself up in a fair exchange for a part of her.

His lady sighs and closes her eyes for a long painful moment, considering her words.

“You used to say you liked the game,” she observes when she opens her eyes, and as she speaks she begins to push fold and lay aside the treaties, raven scrolls and documents, “but what you really enjoyed was governing. Even when you were Master of Coin I saw you slaving over those numbers long into the night until they made sense. It’s not the game you like, you have too much heart in you to keep enjoying manipulating and controlling people who will never love or respect you. It’s the challenge to your mind.”

And as she has done so often in the past few days, she heals a crack in his heart by turning his own beliefs on his head. It steals his breath away, to know that she had payed attention, to know that she had observed him long enough to know and understand him. Long before he’d truly known or understood her. She had never been an empty shell or a ghost, it was just all he’d been able to see for the armor of courtesy that hid away her fear and her sorrow.

“Well, I have a challenge for you,” she says, “come North with me. Help me build a kingdom that will prosper, help me help my people. There is so much I can do on my own, but I cannot carry the load without an equal partner. And for all the tutelage I have received there are things I have yet to learn.”

And Tyrion—

He knows he is expected to grin, to accept the challenge for the playful way it is uttered, because it appeals to his mischievous mind and his sense of competition. But he can barely find his breath for the words she has uttered, barely remembers the challenge for the wishes and wants it expresses. They are still dancing around the issues, afraid to speak, afraid to give away the words first.

_Come North with me._

Tyrion tries to imagine himself North. He tries to think of the wall and the ice and the mud, the burnt bacon and the simple way of life. But all he can see is Sansa dressed in a rich red gown, her hair partially braided, embracing a wolf pelt, her eyes glowing with warmth as she speaks of her family.

“Equal partner,” he murmurs. “Does that mean,” he adds, stepping carefully from his chair and pushing the empty table aside to stand in the middle with so little protection, “as the steward of Winterfell for the Queen in the North, or as her husband and consort?”

It hurts.

This is not a proposal, it’s nothing nearly as brash or courageous. He barely has the strength left to stand on his malformed legs and he’s never felt as weak or as vulnerable as he does now. He is offering himself to her. Nothing more, nothing less. If he were to support her, he would have to give up on all the riches he could offer her here, all the influence of his names and titles would be gone. There is nothing but Tyrion left. Nothing but Tyrion and all the loyalty there is in him, all the loyalty he has always owed her but never been able to give.

And though it had been the same with Daenerys, though he had had less to offer her then, less she wanted and less she was asking for, this time he is putting so much more than his life on the line. Sansa has a way of disarming him, of leaving him open where there is nothing but himself left, ugly and malformed, desperate to be kind. And only once, as he’s offered her his hand, has she accepted. Only ones has she not turned away. Every other time, she has carved a hole in his heart, deeper and more painful than anyhow father could ever have inflicted.

So he looks up into her blue, blue eyes and he thinks that his father’s wish from the day he was born might come true after all.

Tyrion trembles.

“You said yourself,” she says slowly, taking his hands in hers and drawing him closer. Her thumbs draw gentle circles under his palms. “That we have been offered a choice this time. Why would I not choose the best of them, if I could have him?”

Tyrion opens his mouth to protest her reasoning, but Sansa gives him a look that dares him to try, so instead he turns her question back on herself. “Why?”

Some of the courage falls from her then. The cold melts away from her gaze as she lowers it to their joined hands. When she speaks, her voice trembles. “I am the last of my name,” she says. “The last of the Starks. I have a duty to my House and my people. But I cannot fulfil that if it isn’t with a man I trust, a man I could grow to love.”

The chain around her neck tinkles like a bell when she lifts her head. And her expression is so raw, her honesty leaving her so open and vulnerable, Tyrion could never do anything but honor it. For he suddenly understands that she doesn’t just want him for his power or his mind, not for his money or their history. Sansa wants him for his heart, and, romantic as it sounds, it is all he’s ever wanted to give away.

“I want what my parents had,” she says, as if to specify, as if to explain. “It’s not a fairy tale or a romance, but it’s something. Tangible and real.”

Tyrion can still see Winterfell as it had been under Ned Starks rule. Full of children, adopted, bastards and wards. Full of love and trust and affection. Life, as he had never imagined he would be a part of it; one he never imagined he could have. “It sounds like a fairy tale to me, my lady,” he admits. “But that doesn’t mean we can’t make it real.”

* * *

Varys had once told him that men like them will never rule, that they can never grow to be respected. And it’s true, he will never be a war hero. He will never cast a striking figure. But it had been in Winterfell that Tyrion had once impressed Jon Snow enough to call him a king, and it had been in winterfel that a queen had accepted his hand for the first time.

And he doesn’t mind the Northerners don’t like Lannisters. He doesn’t mind they won’t accept them at first.

For the day the Queen in the North and her fellow lords sign the Independence and Peace Treaties between the Kingdom in the North and the Six Kingdoms of Westeros, she smiles so brightly, with so much happiness and so much relief, that tears stream down her face. Sansa, bright and beautiful, fair and just, will always be their Queen. She will always be loved and respected, and that is what her rule will be built on.

And then he nearly laughs.

“It’s funny,” he says to her, “Varys told me to bring a queen to the throne in Westeros, that I should find and help the ideal monarch to climb those steps. But neither of us ever realised that he was talking about you.”

“That almost sounds like treason, my Lord of Lannister,” she jests.

Tyrion winks at her and she has to turn away to hide her laugh. “I have a gift for you, Your Grace,” he adds, snapping his finger.

A servant hurries through the door with a large wooden box in his hands. The Stark sigil is painted on its front, white against black. The boy hurries to place it on the table beside the signed treaties, the ink still not quite dry.

“The day I was assigned this duty by her Grace, Queen Daenerys Targaryen, I sent a raven scroll to our finest silver smiths,” he explains, taking the boy’s place by the table. He waits a beat, until he’s sure they’re all hanging on his every word, runs his fingers gently down the beautiful black wood of the box to the silk handles on each side. “With an order to make this out of the best Northern silver he could procure. The design is based on the original, or the sketches that still remain, few though they are.”

He lifts the lid of the box up, revealing silver crown lying on a pillow of dark grey velvet. Nine broadswords form the only decorations of the crown, spiking with sharp precision towards the sky. It is beautifully constructed with delicate details and Tyrion couldn’t have asked for a better result.

Sansa opens and closes her mouth as she stares at the circlet, for once lost for words at the gesture. With careful, disbelieving steps, she approaches the crown to run her fingers down the blade that will centre her forehead.

But her lords shuffle at her side with somewhat displeasure. “The original crown was made of iron and bronze, Lord Lannister,” one complains aloud.

And Tyrion thinks he wants to strangle him for souring the mood. This is Sansa’s moment after all, as much as it is her people’s. She’s fought for her freedom every step of the way, and she doesn’t deserve some old man meddling where she hasn’t asked for it.

“Iron and Bronze are the metals of war, my lord,” Sansa responds, her voice soft and dangerous. “Silver is the metal of the well-spoken, of diplomacy. We are not conquerors and our peace treaty has ensured us peace from the south for two centuries to come. Silver is the perfect metal for a new era. Thank you, Lord Tyrion.”

The northern frost does not quite melt from her tone as she turns her face to Tyrion. It’s as much a message to him as it is a reminder for her lords to stay in their place. Sansa might never have been a ruler to be feared, but she knows how to keep the respect of those around her. And her eyes, when they land on Tyrion, soften enough to express the gratitude her voice cannot show.

“It doesn’t come free, you know,” he responds. And he smirks at their surprise. “You are still at the Rock, your Grace, and here we all pay a fair price.”

Sansa, unlike her outraged lords, notice when he is in an impish mood and merely raises her eyebrow. “And what price did you have in mind?”

Tyrion’s smirk splits into a grin. “I want the chain around your neck,” he says. And as the mischief drains from her eyes, his own smile vanishes, leaving only somber affection. “The North is finally independent, Your Grace. No one will ever be able to take it from you again. And you are free with it. You should never have to wear chains again.”

And just like that the mood in the room changes. In spite of Sansa clearing his name, to the other Northern lords he is still a Lannister, and the feud between the Starks and the Lannisters is old enough to have been carved into their bones. Tyrion hasn’t helped the matter during the negotiations, for he has stayed loyal to his own queen and done his best to broker a fair alliance between their two nations. Just as Sansa has done her best to do the same from a Northern perspective. But he was always on her side. Even when he couldn’t be loyal to her as he wished, dearly and selfishly, Tyrion has always been on her side. And that dedication is one this gesture, these words illuminate.

He never thought he would touch the hearts of stoic men, of anybody for that matter, but there is a moment when they waver. A moment long enough for him to wave for another servant to hand them silver goblets of wine. It’s enough to make their scowls soften into almost smiles, and Tyrion will accept it for the victory it is.

Sansa exhales through her nose. It’s not quite a sigh. It sounds more like a breath she’s held for years and years. Maybe even longer than Tyrion has known her. And silently, carefully, with trembling fingers she removed the chain that’s held her captured since her childhood. The silver trickles around her neck and into her hands like water from a fountain. And when she is free, she lets the chain fall from her grasp into Tyrion’s hands.

It’s cold, like northern ice, like a broken curse. And it washes away the touch of gold carved into his skin.

This he will remember for as long as he lives: the feeling of freedom that comes from falling into the blue depths of Sansa Starks eyes as she washes away their curses. As he vows to guard her freedom and her happiness with whatever means at his disposal.

This he will remember beyond his grave, this has been carved into his soul: Sansa’s hand in his as she kneels. The way her dark grey skirts flow out around her, the silver decorations catching the glow from the windows like snow from a winter night, her crimson hair against the white sky framed by snow. The way she bows her neck gracefully, eyes falling closed, and the weight of the silver crown under his fingers before it slides away over her head.

Tyrion’s voice is hoarse as he speaks “It is with honor I present to you, Her Grace, Sansa Stark, Queen and Sovereign of the Kingdom in the North. From this day, until the end of time.”

It is not fire he sees in her eyes when she throws them open, not the fire of the dragon, as he had once seen it in Daenerys Targaryen as she accepted her crown. It is the cold eternity of the endless North, it is the benevolence of the first snow. It is the sea that will catch him and wash him away, far from his shores and his gold. It is the knowledge, this surety of fact, that he was born to winter and that this winter queen could lead him anywhere, to the edge of the world and beyond, and he would follow her, for she would never lead him astray.

Something curious happens, then, that Tyrion does not expect. He hears it before he sees it; the clicks of goblets being placed on hard wood, and he turns just as the Lords of the North draw their swords.

Sansa’s hand lands briefly, gracefully, against his shoulder, as if she means to calm him, before turning to face them. One by one the lords kneel to her, their swords poised in front of them in tribute to her honor.

“The North remembers all the kings that came before,” the old man in the front says, “but it was a queen that brought us peace and freedom. We stand behind House Stark as we have done it for a thousand years and beyond, now and forever. By the will of the old gods.”

And finally, under the protection of House Lannister, the North raise their swords in greeting to Sansa Stark.

“The Queen in the North!”

**Author's Note:**

> THANK YOU FOR READING!!!  
> I hope you enjoyed it!!  
> It was really fun to write this because Tyrion is such a Lost cause and you can't tell me otherwise. It was fun to play with all the metaphors and symbols, all the poetry and imagery in their character designs! And it was nice to go full on admiration, unlike the last fandom I was in. It's been a while since I could play with it the way I enjoy so much!
> 
> I used several concepts from my own culture (I'm Danish and thus part of the original North xD) in order to give a little more life to Sansa’s experiences and feelings as a northerner. Her comment on northern honesty and southern deceit is a direct translation of how it feels to originate in the Northern part of Denmark and how we often end up feeling about people in the capital.  
> And the entire inn scene at the inn is inspired by how we as a people have chosen to handle the cold and the dark (in winter we only have 4-5 hours of daylight). It’s a concept that have been exported quite a lot, called Hygge, and it’s often chalked up to basic materialistic things, when it’s really about the simple intimacy of focusing in a very simple way on time spent with loved ones.  
> The honesty bit also applies to why I think that Sansa likes Tyrion. He’s always been perilously honest for her sake, especially in the series, threatening Joffrey, speaking up for her in court, and going against his father’s direct orders. I’m a little sad I couldn’t add it directly to the story, because it’s something she keeps to herself, but it speaks to Tyrion’s own insecurities that he doesn’t immediately see the connection, I think.
> 
> The cages and the design of the restaurant is inspired by Scott Lynch's restaurants in his Gentleman Bastard series, which I cannot recommend enough! (GRRM himself is a fan of these books!)  
> And the "curiosity often wins against dignity" is a comment from a series called Goblin. I've been listening to one of the songs from there called I Will Go To You Like The First Snow interchangeably with Jenny of Oldstones because both songs hold that melancholic sense of longing that I feel suits Tyrion so well.
> 
> (If you find any grammar mistakes or typos please have mercy on me. I'll be back tomorrow to correct what is left of them)
> 
> Thank you again for reading! I hope you enjoyed this fic!


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